The Black History of the White House (54 page)

For the most part, the Obama White House exhibited restraint on these controversies and either intervened legally or spoke out without addressing the underlying racial dimensions. Many of these issues were used by conservatives to bolster their case that the Obama administration is “anti-white” and, as right-wing Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck infamously stated, that Obama himself has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”
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However, two incidents stand out where Obama and key members of his administration actually allowed the right-wing media and politicos to dictate their response, leaving many inside and outside the black community unsatisfied and agitated. The July 16, 2009, incident involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who is African American, and James Crowley, a white police officer for the city of Cambridge, Massachusettes, symbolizes the racial minefield that lies before Obama and the country. When Gates and his black driver arrived at his house, they found the front door jammed and Gates had to enter by the back door. Gates and his driver then attempted to force the front door open, an action that promoted a call to the police, though the caller did not identify the men as black nor claim that there was a crime being committed. After the police arrived, a confrontation ensued that led to some back-and-forth between Gates and Crowley, who decided to arrest the Harvard professor on the charge of disorderly conduct, a charge that was
later dropped. A national controversy exploded over whether Crowley went overboard in making the arrest, given that in spite of the heat of the moment Gates was in his home and no crime had been committed. In response to a reporter's question about the incident, Obama stated the police “acted stupidly.”
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His words were immediately pounced upon by conservatives. Writing in the
Wall Street Journal
, conservative Shelby Steele, who wrote a book in 2007 outlining why Obama could not win the presidency, opined, “Mr. Obama's ‘postracialism' was a promise to operate outside of tired cultural narratives. But he has a demon arm of reflexive racialism—identity politics, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and now Skip Gates.”
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Much of the black media and black public opinion, carrying two-and-a-half-centuries of police abuse and ongoing experiences with racial profiling, sided with Obama.
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Eventually, the controversy was defused when Obama invited Gates, Crowley, and Vice President Joe Biden to the White House to have a beer and discuss the matter. The “beer summit” was probably the first of its kind at the White House and was the most notable White House meal, outside of an official state dinner, since the Roosevelt-Washington supper more than 100 years earlier.

While the media focused on the short phrase “acted stupidly,” the whole of Obama's remarks addressed not only the Gates incident but the larger context of racial profiling. He also noted that “race remains a factor in this society,” words rarely spoken by any white political leaders. His whole response was:

The Gates incident, minor in many respects, underscores the inescapable challenge of race that the administration will have to address whether it wants to or not. It also shows that Obama's reflex on race, in an unguarded moment, reflects the temperament and understandings of most African Americans. Fortunately, Obama has demonstrated that when he does take on the issue, his intellect, sentiments, and politics are generally progressive in direction. The struggle will be to get him to take up these concerns despite the political costs and the tendency of some of his advisers to move cautiously, if at all.

The Gates controversy revolved around Obama's use of a loaded word whose racial dimensions were seized upon by the conservative press and opportunistic politicians. The situation's ultimate resolution by the “beer summit” evaded the larger issue of racism in the criminal justice system. However, it would be the actions of his administration in another incident that revealed the power of the right-wing media to strike fear throughout his government when it comes to racial matters. On July 19, 2010, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who has a long history of producing carefully doctored videos, posted a video clip on his website,
Biggovernment.org
, a clip that had already been circulating on
two other right-wing websites,
Hotair.com
and
USActionNews.com
. It reportedly showed a black U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee stating that she had discriminated against a white farmer because he was white and arrogant. The employee, Shirley Sherrod, says in the two-and-a-half-minute clip that she did not give “the full force of what [she] could do” to help a white farmer who came to her for assistance.
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Her remarks were given at an event held by the NAACP in Douglas, Georgia. On Monday morning, July 19, the story was picked up by Fox News and began to rapidly spread to other news organizations and throughout the Internet.

Racial tensions were in the air, because the previous week had witnessed a public scuffle between the NAACP and the tea party movement. On July 14, 2010, the NAACP passed a resolution at its annual convention that called for tea party leaders to denounce the racist behavior that had been manifest at some of its events.
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The response of some tea party leaders and activists was to incorrectly accuse the NAACP of calling the entire tea party movement racist. The controversy was furthered intensified when one tea party leader, Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express, wrote a supposedly satirical letter from an enslaved black individual to President Lincoln using racist imagery and language. He wrote, “We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop.”
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He and the Tea Party Express were subsequently booted out of the National Tea Party Federation, an organization with dozens of member organizations and affiliates. Tea party leaders from Sarah Palin to Michelle Bachman defended the virtually all-white movement against the NAACP, mostly by
not addressing the issue that had been raised but simply accusing the NAACP of being racial hustlers or worse.

When the Sherrod story first broke, officials at the USDA panicked, believing that the administration was about to be attacked for sanctioning “reverse racism.” Reportedly, some unnamed sources within the White House raised concerns that all the facts were not known, but no one there intervened to prevent what occurred next.
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Within hours, Sherrod came under intense pressure from high officials in the department, including Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who, solely based on news reports, wanted to put her on immediate suspension. Sherrod had been appointed in August 2009 as the first black director of the USDA's Rural Development in Georgia. At one point, on Monday evening, Undersecretary Cheryl Cook caught up with Sherrod as she was driving. Sherrod stated that while she was attempting to explain her side of the story, she was asked to pull over to the side of the road and immediately submit her resignation via text message, because the issue was “going to be on
Glenn Beck
” that evening.
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In fact, she had tried days earlier to warn Vilsack and other USDA officials that a bogus clip was circulating, but information she sent via email either went to addresses that were no longer in use, rarely checked, or were sat on by a mid-level official.
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Sherrod was pressured to resign, but she did not go down passively. Meanwhile, the NAACP issued a statement denouncing Sherrod and applauding her resignation. Officials with the organization had addressed the issue earlier with the White House Office of Public Engagement, an office run by Obama's highest ranking black staffer, Valarie Jarrett.
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The NAACP wrote in its condemnation, “We concur with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack in accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod for her remarks at a local NAACP Freedom Fund banquet. Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod
had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race. We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.”
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Suspicious of the source, some news organizations, in particular MSNBC's
Rachel Maddow Show
, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, and CNN, raised questions about the legitimacy of the tape and tried to locate Sherrod to interview her. As it turned out, by Tuesday morning the clip was exposed to be entirely misleading—in fact, Sherrod had been using the story to tell how she overcame whatever prejudicial feelings she had had, realizing that people of all races needed help. The incident had occurred twenty-four years earlier in 1985 when she worked for a local nonprofit, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Black Land Fund (FSC), not while she was an employee of the U.S. government. In the full version of the speech, she states, “God helped me to see that it's not just about black people—it's about poor people.”
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In speaking about her work helping the farmer in question, she stated, “Well, working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't, you know. And they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic.”
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She ended up playing a decisive role in helping the farmer, Roger Spooner, save his farm, a fact that he and his wife, Eloise, testified to in subsequent media interviews.
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Calls and emails began to flood into the White House and Agriculture Department demanding Sherrod's reinstatement.

The cruel irony of the situation, in which a black USDA employee is accused of racism against a white farmer and is forced to resign, was that in the long history of struggle around black land ownership and fairness for black farmers, the USDA had never fired a single white employee for the virulent, overt, and persistent racism in its ranks against blacks and other people
of color. That the USDA has a dishonorable record of racial discrimination is indisputable. In its history of documented racism the USDA has denied loans to black and minority farmers, given loans that were too late in the farming cycle, conducted excessive supervisions of loans that white farmers did not have to endure, ignored black famers' claims of discrimination, disrespected individuals, and had a mostly whites-only hiring policy.
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In 1983, President Reagan eliminated the USDA Office of Civil Rights, which would not be reopened until 1996, but even then did little to address the concerns of farmers of color.
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Indeed, the USDA's own National Commission on Small Farmers—which itself was created as a result of black farmer's complaints about discrimination—declared in 1998 it was disturbed by “the indifference and blatant discrimination experienced by minority farmers in their interactions with USDA programs and staff. . . . Discrimination has been a contributing factor in the dramatic decline of Black farmers over the last several decades.”
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Sherrod herself had been a victim of USDA discrimination. In 1969, the Sherrods founded the New Communities Land Trust, a black farm cooperative in Lee County, Georgia. Suffering from the same drought that struck much of the South in the mid-to-late 1970s, New Communities applied for and was promised an emergency loan by federal authorities in1982. However, the distribution of the money was controlled by state officials then under the governorship of stern segregationist Lester Maddox of pickaxe fame. The “emergency loan” came three years too late and the farm was forced to close in 1985. A Sherrod family farm faced a similar fate, which is why she was included in the subsequent lawsuit filed by black farmers against the USDA.
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